As the size of virtual environments grows, the size of backup window will increase manifold. Traditional backup methodologies fail to meet the Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) associated with today's business needs. Even if there are solutions offered to do seamless backup even during business time, this leads to contention of compute resource with the actual business application.
A backup window is the time required to perform and finish a backup, which is directly related to the backup process itself. Typically, depending on the size of data to be backed up, down time (sometimes in the hours) has to be identified in a business process. Backups, being a necessary activity, would lead to definite shrink in productive hours. The snapshot capability at various levels, such as at the volume level or the application level, may reduce down time by enabling backups even during production. But still there is a continuous endeavor to swiftly perform backups of large data sets (ranging in terabytes “TBs” or even more). Further, it has been observed that with conventional backup technologies data is typically sent in a single stream, which would result in under usage of network capabilities.